Nova 93.7 breakfast announcers Nathan, Nat and Shaun recently
walked eight kilometres to work while broadcasting their 6-9am
breakfast show live from the streets of Perth.

Coinciding with the official ‘Walk to Work Day,’ the trio
travelled on foot from Maylands to Subiaco to see what life is like
outside the confines of the studio. This presented some obvious
technical challenges, however we were up to the task thanks to some
creative thinking and cellular wireless technology.

My colleague and Technology Support Engineer Simon Lovell and I
turned to Tieline’s ViA codec in order to design a robust wireless
solution, with the redundancy required to ensure our top-rating
breakfast show stayed on the air.

The ViA is a portable codec with 3 mic/line XLR inputs. It was
perfect for our requirements and we connected 3 cabled hand-held
microphones for Nathan, Nat and Shaun. We also attached two USB
modems to the ViA codec – one for the Telstra cellular network and
one for Optus. I am a big believer in backup and diversity, so we
employed Tieline’s SmartStream PLUS dual redundant streaming over
the two connections back to a Tieline Merlin at the studio. We fed
mono program audio back to the studio and received a mix-minus on
the return path.

Nathan, Nat and Shaun broadcasting

live with ViA

Simon walked with the breakfast crew over the 8 km journey and
carried the ViA and a battery-powered Sennheiser IEM transmitter,
which was fed mix-minus audio from the XLR output on the ViA. The
IEM transmitter was mounted on a pole above Simon’s head, which was
probably a little bit of overkill, but it ensured a reliable link
to each announcer’s receiver as they walked through the
streets.

The team was joined by sporting personalities and other guests
along the way and the entire broadcast was brilliant. It was an
incredibly successful OB and the ViA using SmartStream PLUS
exceeded all expectations. We anticipated perhaps one or two
dropouts, but we had none! We had a slight increase in the jitter
buffer at one stage, but the codec managed the streaming seamlessly
and after we passed through this area, the codec returned to
regular low latency transmissions.

Walking and talking on
'Walk to Work' Day

Simon walked the hard yards on this one and did a sterling job.
Some of the team remarked in good humour that he resembled
something very similar to a Ghostbuster, which was quite amusing.
Simon was using the codec for the first time and remarked, “the ViA
blew me away, it’s a great little unit!”

Given the success of the broadcast, and the breakfast crew’s
new-found love for the outdoors, there's every chance going forward
that our Nova studios will be used less in future! We’ve also
proved beyond doubt that you can achieve rock-solid cellular live
broadcasts from pretty much anywhere using the technology available
nowadays.